For those that don't know-- although Octave is interpreted, the interpreted part acts as an interface to highly optimized vector operations under the covers. S

For those that don't know-- although Octave is interpreted, the interpreted part acts as an interface to highly optimized vector operations under the covers. Signal processing and a lot of other tasks come down to manipulating large arrays of data using similar operations across the entire array. Although Octave is interpreted, these kinds of operations execute very nicely inside Octave. Octave also lets you write those kinds of operations at a very high level, like a = b * c, and under the covers it's doing millions of operations. If you'd like to give Octave a try and learn about Machine Learning at the same time, try this excellent and fun free course! https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning One of the later lessons in that class is a mind-blowing signal processing thing. In that exercise, they show how you can put multiple mics in a room, with multiple people talking over each other, and the computer separates out the different sources of sounds, and outputs a clean wav file for each sound source with the sounds isolated from each other. It blew my mind, and was implemented in Octave. And they teach you exactly how to do it yourself. All the above concepts can, of course, be done in C++ or NumPy or whatever, they just use Octave to teach the course.